Seeds Vs Grapes

In conversation with 5yr old on grapes and seeds, and how the grape seeds are planted to get the grapes while she was eating red grapes and how she didn’t like those because of seeded grapes. and asks, if these seeds are planted to get the grapes, how are seedless grapes planted when there were no seeds. … and so also seedless Oranges, seedless Pomegranates, etc?

Market Place

It has been a long time since I had been to any crowded market place – like farmers market, etc. Though a bit cloudy last weekend, we went to a market which we always wanted to go visit but had never made that time to go over.

Weather has been interestingly off and on. We had about 70 minutes before the shops would close for the day. My wife was keen on looking for flowers and vegetable section. My daughter was just enjoying the walk around the crowded place, and to me, I was going around taking several pictures. It was a great walk there. Although it was not as crowded or interesting as the markets i had been to in Bangalore (India) 🙂 – In a way they are two extremes.

     

Flowers are one of the greatest attractions on this part of the world during the spring summer. We don’t get to see many of those once the fall/winter starts. we bought this beautiful bouquet of flowers from one of those stores

Fish Market
This market is also popular for fish section, although i couldn’t find where that sections was, and i wasn’t interested to go over there either. However, from what i have heard, the fish merchants or store keepers are almost always so energetic and enthusiastic about sharing the details about fish, asking questions, answering questions – and more importantly the Team Building. People often say, you’ve GOT TO learn the skills of team building and one-ness (working towards the common goal) from industry perspective, from teams perspective. That is something I wanted to see.

While walking around there, I did hear someone commenting, it is so smelly to go around the Fish market. Well, it is ought to be. However, that is probably why I didn’t dare exploring that side. I might even faint seeing those things and the smell in that area.

for the rest, yes it was great place with lots of activities.

Creativity:
This guy was playing an instrument made out of a tin tub and a string tied to it with a bamboo stick. It sounded very well. There was a huge crowd watching this mini-concert  there.

 

Looks like I didn’t capture, but a guy from blown glass articles store was packing those glass arts with bubble wrap and tied with a transparent duck tape so well, and one could carry the item without worrying about breaking them. I don’t know the price of those articles, must be expensive enough, but I guess the amount of tape and wrap he used for each item he packed could be of around 5 dollars. Talk about the Customer Experience aspect of it, I am sure is fantastic. I noticed people bought things just for the packing, although they know they are going to rip open the package when they get home. several of those people took pictures with the shop keeper. The packing skill was very much APPRECIATED.

at the end of 70minutes, we stepped into one of the cool joints and yes, it was time for a lovely ice-cream. We enjoyed the ice cream in that rather quiet ice-cream store.

 

By then most of the stores were rolling down the shutters and it was time for us to leave the place. and noticed some sunshine too around the end of the day.

It was a great afternoon after all. We will probably go over again in next few weeks. And this time we should probably make it earlier in the day instead of later in the afternoon.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays…

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate xmas and Happy Holidays to rest others…

have a great holiday week end…

Website Authenticity … How to identify?

There has always been a concern about Phishing sites. We get those URLs via emails, through other sites, hyperlinks everywhere. Those hyperlink targets may or may not go to the sites indicated on the text – of course, depends on how trustworthy the link is.

This has been a concern when the URLs were readable and judge the authenticity based on best of your knowledge. But still, most of us have been victims to unsafe site target at least once irrespective of recent browser versions alerting the users about how genuine the site is via their phishing identification tools / features.

Add on to that, these days, is the concern about shortened URLs. Yes, shortened URLs came into existence ever since the SMS texting, Twitter, or so called 140 characters limit texts – microblogging era started in recent years.

> How do you trust those short URLs?
> On what assumptions would you dare click that link?
> How can you mitigate the risk of not ending up where you didn’t want to end up with?
> How would you make sure you don’t fall victim for identity thefts?

One simple and straight forward answer could be – Do not click those links. well, does it always happen that way?

i recently came across http://www.googlegooglegooglegoogle.com –> it is pretty neat. It presents you 4 frames with google home page and you can provide 4 different search on the same browser instance. Its very handy.

well talking about this googlegooglegooglegoogle site or its authenticity is not the intent of this post. but just thought about other misleading URLs.

Well, if you bing for phishing sites or URL authenticity or “how to trust URLs” etc, you may find umpteen number of resources, Checklists, ToDo’s, guidelines, tons of resources….

Well…. this post did not answer the question “How to identify” because that still remains my question for now.. Please comment your resources and pointers here… and this title seems really misleading here… 🙂

Mysore palace on Bing.com Today

Great to see the well lighted Mysore Palace on http://www.bing.com website today. Happy Independence Day

Recoup my valuable blood….

 

How long does it take to recover 3 tubes of blood? I went to a lab few days ago and the person there drew about 3 collection tubes of my blood. I usually don’t like to see my own blood being drawn, yes, I get fainted some times. however, I was dare enough to watch my blood being drawn this time. First off I noticed there were 3 empty tubes, I wondered but still didn’t ask anything. She prepared my arm to find a vein and there the pin / syringe was pierced into my my veins. Now the Blood poured through the pipe and into the tubes, it (blood) didn’t even ask me 😦

image source: http://www.haemtech.com/images2/tubes.jpg

Now, so much of blood is out, I think I would have to focus on eating more beetroots and apples to regain that amount of blood in a couple of days or a week? 🙂

"baski hodeyodhu" sit-ups or in other words "SuperBrain yoga"

 

hmm.. apparently we thought this so-called exercise, that we were given in our school days –

both in schools and at home, as a punishment. I would go to school a little late, and we would two kinds of punishments when we missed the very first part of the school, which is Prayer session. 1. Run around the field for two complete rounds 2. perform this sit-ups that we used to call “baski” in kannada.

Well, it was indeed treated as a punishment back then.

(picture source: h t t p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSwhpF9iJSs)

Other instance when we would Perform was before Lord Ganesh as part the prayer – at home and at hindu temples. performing this for 21 times is a general practice. As kids we never knew there was a scientific reason behind such an activity. Although growing up, we learned that there are nerve endpoints in ear lobes that helps triggering the brain activities.

It is now both funny and interesting to see this is being named as “Super Brain Yoga” and would be interesting to learn who is filing a Patent on this discovery!!

I am sure the number “21 times” would also have some scientific significance. A related context i remember is, if a new activity to become a habit, you must continue performing the activity for 21 days. I can relate this 21 times to the “5-minutes-a-day” as the put across in the attached video and it takes aobut 5 minutes to perform this activity 21 times.

Interestingly, wikipedia does not have any entry about this brain yoga yet.

Happy New Year 2009

Wish you all a very happy healthy

& prosperous New Year 2009

Photoblog – one snap a day

Just created another blog [snap-a-day] on wordpress to post my random pictures. I had never noticed this type of theme available on wordpress, it looks cool. I picked the monotone theme that changes the background (close to) according to the picture, as I have noticed.  Hoping to post one picture a day (I think it might be a good start if I make it once a week to start with?)

Incident to a Movie or a Movie to an incident?

So sorry to hear Mumbai’s incident last week. Although emergency teams worked hard to clear the area, it is the question of lives, question of safety and security, question of freedom to civilians. What did those civilians do to end up with such fatal incident?

Watching Udaya news the other night about all these, it although appeared to be a movie where the acts were carefully planned and executed. It is interesting despite the security measures (assuming there was some security at a 5-* hotel), these things still happen. Is it like such incidents were copied from the Movies Or Movies made after such incidents. Looks like there is going to be a bollywood movie about this incident, just like the ones we noticed so far (Mission Kashmir, etc..) in various different languages across India.

Rest in Peace – for all those victims from this fatal incident.